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Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Is ObamaCare Imploding or Exploding?

Obamanites insist the health law is set to explode to rival Medicare and Medicaid as popular federal programs to protect the public by making health care affordable.
This has not yet happened in the 7 years since the health law passed. But, argue advocates. big time, complex, compassionate social initiatives affecting millions take time, or so the government elites say. Maybe ObamaCare just has a long fuse, about to ignite.

Conservatives maintain 7 years is long enough to judge the merits of any social program, and ObamaCare will implode once its consequences - higher premiums, massive deductibles, rising out of pocket expenses, and limited access and choice of doctors, hospitals, and health plans become evident.

The conservative worldview does not sit well with progressives “who believe they are smarter than the masses, who think people are not capable of self-government, who fancy themselves as intelligent social designers, or who simply have a hard time imagining non-command-and-control solutions to problems”.

So reasons Matt Ridley, an evolutionary biologist, in his book The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (Harper, 2015), like the Internet and the mobile phone revolution.

Ridley says, “ Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organizing, self-changing place…Skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, termites build cathedrals without architects, bees make hexagonal honeycombs without instruction, brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching, political events are shaped by history rather than vice-versa.”

Maybe people and their doctors can self-organize a health system a system that suits both. Maybe overwrought central planning is unnecessary. Maybe we can create a better balance between top-down design and bottom-up freedom. Maybe we ought to decentralize than centralize care. Maybe in a self-organizing system we can achieve a more patient-friendly, convenient, and less costly system.

Maybe all those ObamaCare skeptics writing about the “ObamaCare implosion” are right with articles entitled “ObamaCare Rapidly Imploding” ; “The Slow Motion Implosion of ObamaCare;” The ObamaCare Implosion is Worst Than Thought”; “The ObamaCare Co-Op Implosion”; “Watch ObamaCare Implode”; “ObamaCare Implosion: It’s Not Just the Website.”

The Health Reform Maze

Buy the Book

Book Description: In this first book in a series of four, Richard L. Reece, MD. provides a unique view of the roll out, and run up, of the Affordable Care Act. Reece shows in this book the progress and facets of ObamaCare's marketers and messengers, as the day approached for the launch of health insurance exchanges - the single most public and problematic portion of the new law. This is a must read for anyone who wants to chronicle this attempt to organize more than one-sixth of the U.S. economy by adding layers of federal government control and regulations.

Reece has been writing about U.S. health care for more than 45 years. His knowledge and experience, added to his keen intellect and gift of subtle humor, make this book a valuable part of anyone's collection.